Tag Archives: ernest tubb record shop

Fans go wild as Eric Church performs at LP Field for the first nightly concert at the 2013 CMA Music Festival on Thursday. (Photo Larry McCormack/The Tennessean)

Big to bigger.

Bustling to jam-packed.

Twelve years after moving from the hot, dusty fairgrounds to Nashville’s burgeoning downtown, the CMA Music Festival is Nashville’s sold-out signature event. This year’s festival sold out the main LP Field nightly concerts of 50,000 fans six weeks in advance before even offering single-night tickets.

As the festival wrapped its record-breaking year Sunday night, threatening storms prompted festival organizers to accelerate the LP Field show. Only the first two acts — Lee Greenwood and Gary Allan — played full sets before show host Storme Warren announced that the rest of the acts would be shortened so fans could see all the artists.

Brad Paisley was on stage 12 minutes, playing two songs. Jake Owen played one song, a move that drew loud boos from the crowd. Carrie Underwood, who brought Paisley back out for their duet “Remind Me,” played 20 minutes. She ended the show around 10:10 p.m., about two hours earlier than the Saturday show concluded.

Attendance high

The shortened concert was an odd cap to the weekend; the fact that the festival sold out four-day passes in advance meant more people stayed downtown for longer periods of time.

“A lot more people are walking the streets now than were here when I came to town, in 1960,” he said. “But this place here looks the same to me.”

That place was the Ernest Tubb Record Shop, where Rhodes stood once again Saturday on the small stage at the back of the store. Rhodes played guitar with Ernest Tubb for seven years, and Tubb often performed on his store’s stage.

Legendary guitarist Leon Rhodes brought a red Epiphone guitar with him on Saturday, for display at Earnest Tubb Record Shop.

Rhodes brought a red Epiphone guitar with him on Saturday, for display at the shop.
“I played that all through everything I did with Mr. Tubb,” Rhodes said. “That’s recording sessions, show dates, you name it.”

Those recording sessions included ones for Tubb records such as the instrumental “Honey Fingers” and notables “Red Top,” “Cool It” and “Texas Troubadour Stomp.”

The “Midnite Jamboree” continues as Saturday becomes Sunday, with Country Music Hall of Famer Mel Tillis performing at the Tubb shop’s Music Valley Drive location. And Rhodes will be back at the Lower Broadway store next Saturday, June 15, from 3-6 p.m.

Downtown retailers were happily crowded Thursday morning and afternoon with fans seeking their ideas of the good stuff: Sometimes that meant morning booze at Margaritaville Nashville, often it meant live music at various Lower Broadway honky-tonks, and for hundreds it meant combing Ernest Tubb Record Shop for classic country treasures.

The Tubb shops aim to carry the entirety of country music’s recorded history on CD, so for many tourists a trip to the store on Lower Broadway is a chance to pick up favorite material that they can’t find back home.

International guests are plentiful there during CMA Music Festival: Thursday, German speakers and Japanese speakers conversed about the selection (They didn’t converse with each other, because that would have been on toward pointless), and manager Stephen Bowen said French customers had been by on Wednesday.

“It’ll be like this all day and night,” Bowen said, nodding to a crowded sales floor.
Thursday afternoon, Janie Fricke and The Roys performed at the shop, and international favorite (to the point that she now lives in Spain) Rattlesnake Annie will sing at 7:30 p.m. Friday’s docket, which also includes Randy Rudder signing his Chicken Soup For The Country Soul book at noon, and afternoon performances from Bobby Marquez, Bobby Rice, Georgette Jones, and another duel appearance from Fricke and The Roys. Oh, and Russ Varnell plays Friday night at 8 p.m.

Saturday, there’s plenty of music, including a concert by Ernest Tubb’s (the actual Country Music Hall of Famer, not the store that bears his name) old guitarist, Leon Rhodes at 1 p.m. Music continues through Sunday afternoon, concluding with a concert from The Chuck Wagon Gang at 3 p.m.

Click to see a gallery of Kitty Wells over the years (this photo of Marty Robbins, Wells and Chet Atkins in 1957: Jack Corn / The Tennessean)

Sixty years ago. May 3, 1952.

That’s the day that Kitty Wells walked somewhat reluctantly into Castle Studios, accompanied by a band that featured her husband, Johnnie Wright, on a big, aluminum upright bass.

By the time Wells walked out of the studio that day, she’d recorded two minutes and 33 seconds of material that would change the course of country music, make possible the careers of Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline and many others, and create a spot for Wells as one of the pioneering figures in country music.

The song she recorded that day — the song that changed everything — was called “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.”

Music is all up there in the ether, on a digital cloud that rains melodies from Adele and Abba, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Stevie Wonder, the E Street Band and Elmo the kindly Muppet monster.

And we can hear 15 million songs for free via the Spotify service, and we can share them with our friends over the Internet. (I like to share them with folks I don’t like, as well, instant messaging jerky people with Toni Basil’s song about “Oh, Mickey, you’re so fine,” just ’cause I know it’ll stick in their heads all day.)

What we call “physical product” has faded away. The future is now, and it’s hashtags and MP3s, and everybody’s doing it.

“Everybody’s not doing it,” says Doyle Davis. But what would he know? Poor sap co-owns an antique shop that he insists on calling “a record store,” Grimey’s New & Preloved Music over on Eighth Avenue South. And the bulk of his business comes from sales of brand new physical product.

Author and music historian Dick Spottswood's new book is just out, and it's already in need of an update.

Spottswood will appear at the Ernest Tubb Record Shop, 417 Broadway in Nashville, at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 16 to talk about banjo great Wade Mainer and to sign copies of Banjo on the Mountain: Wade Mainer's First Hundred Years.

Why's an update needed? Well, Mainer is now 103 years old. So there are three more years to catch us up on.

He was a major influence on what has come to be known as bluegrass music. He played in the East Room of the White House for President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941, and he made his Grand Ole Opry debut in July of 2002, when he was a spry 95.

Spottswood will also be at the Texas Troubadour Theatre, 2474 Music Valley Drive, for a book signing at 9 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 18.

The Country Music Hall of Famer, who became a pioneering figure in country music when her “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” topped country charts in 1952, is the rare Music City star to actually have been born in Nashville. She was born Muriel Deason but took the stage name Kitty Wells after a folk song, “I’m A-Goin’ To Marry Kitty Wells.” She was Billboard’s top female artist of the decade for the 1950s and again for the 1960s.

Wells is retired now, living in Madison with her husband of 72 (count ’em!) years, Johnnie Wright.

Wells' 90th birthday celebration was held at the Ernest Tubb Record Shop's Texas Troubadour Theatre in Nashville. Click her image above to see a gallery of photos from the event.

Marty Stuart’s Ghost Train: The Studio B Sessions album hits stores on Tuesday (August 24), and it’s as good a representation of Stuart’s art and soul as anything he’s done.

He recorded it at the historic studio where Elvis Presley, the Everly Brothers, Jim Reeves and so many others made classic hits, he wrote songs that evoke country music’s history and its future, with lyrics that touch on Stuart’s past. And he brought in not only his Fabulous Superlatives band but also legendary figures such as his wife, Connie Smith, and veteran steel guitar great Ralph Mooney.

“Moon is my favorite musician,” Stuart said. “And he’s playing great. Why would you throw away a Picasso? An eternal gift is an eternal gift.”

Stuart and his Superlatives (Kenny Vaughan, Paul Martin and Harry Stinson) play an album-release show on Wednesday, Aug. 25 at the Belcourt Theatre.

What else is up in Stuart’s world? As usual, nearly everything. He’s producing a Connie Smith album, he’s planning a third season of RFD TV’s The Marty Stuart Show, he’s featured in The Art of Country Music: The Marty Stuart Collection exhibit at New Orleans’ Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and he’s put together the new "Marty Selects" section at Davis-Kidd Booksellers.Continue reading →

“The worst thing is when you’re living and looking but can’t participate in anything,” Louvin said Thursday, sitting on his couch at home in Wartrace. “So I am doing the Midnite Jamboree this coming Saturday night. I’ve got a bunch of guys and gals coming to help. I’m not even sure I can sing, but I know how to talk, and introduce songs, and play records.”

The Jamboree takes place at 10 p.m., at the Tubb Record Shops’ Texas Troubadour Theatre, 2416 Music Valley Drive. It’s open to the public, and will be broadcast at midnight on WSM AM 650.

Louvin, who went through a painful surgery in late July, is meeting with doctors in early September to see about the next medical steps.

“They said we failed so far on being able to remove the cancer from the pancreas, but we’ll come up with another plan,” he said. “I don’t know what they’ve got up their sleeve, but I’m sure it’ll hurt.”

Broadcast live on 650 WSM AM and hosted by Eddie Stubbs, the event served both as a birthday party and as a study of Wiseman’s expansive career.

Though he played bluegrass festivals and was featured on bluegrass radio stations throughout most of his 65-year professional career, Wiseman’s warm, sometimes crooning voice allowed him to traipse into country, folk, swing and pop terrains. Known as “The voice with a heart,” Wiseman was also a founding officer of the Country Music Association, and a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts’ National Heritage Fellowship.

The crowd of well-wishers that assembled on Sunday included Grand Ole Opry stars (nice to see Jeannie Seely out and about -- she lost her riverside home in the flood), bluegrass luminaries and numerous others. Ernest Tubb Record Shops owner David McCormick escorted hundreds of guests up the stairs onto the theatre’s stage, where they greeted Wiseman with hugs and handshakes.

Wiseman recalled that all of his genre-hopping didn’t always go over well with traditional bluegrassers. His version of the Kris Kristofferson-penned “Me and Bobby McGee” was heard, and dismissed, by Father of Bluegrass Bill Monroe.Continue reading →